


Time Warp

by orphan_account



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Vegas, boys kissing idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25096585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Theo convinces Boris to go back to where it all began
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 2
Kudos: 60





	Time Warp

_Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories,  
_ _so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade._

_ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars _

I floated the idea of going back to Vegas one last time to Boris a few times. It didn’t take much research to find out that Canyon Shadows had become something of a ghost town. It was featured in some Nevada local newspaper along with other abandoned so-called neighborhoods. Waste of space, the paper said.

“No good,” Boris had said, eyes closed when I first asked him in Antwerp. The TV chattered on quietly. “No point in going back, see what’s left. Nothing there for us now.”

Eventually, with some insistence and a promise of doing the gambling on the Strip we hadn’t been able to do as kids, he agreed to come with me. He chatted with Gyuri throughout most of the plane journey while I sat staring out the window, an anxious ball sinking heavily on my stomach despite the Xanax, wondering why the hell I’d been so eager to go back to a place I’d narrowly escaped.

Boris was silent as we waited for Gyuri to hire a rental car. I stared at my shoes, at the people heading to security, women in stiletto heels and men with flashy watches, sunburnt kids, hungover survivors of Vegas bachelor parties. Anywhere but Boris. Despite it all- despite everything- I was worried he would be looking at me in the way people looked at old women who wanted someone to talk at while they went through photograph albums only they cared about. He didn’t even want to come in the first place.

He sat in the back next to me when Gyuri finally pulled up, our bags in the trunk, the AC blasting. The few seconds of walking between the airport and the car was enough to pull me into a different headspace, though it was no better. The blast of desert heat. Long nights, back sticky with sweat. Boris and Gyuri were right back to talking, slipping between English and Russian, roaring with laughter. They died down after a while, Gyuri glancing up at us in the rear-view mirror, Boris with his hand on his chin, staring out gloomily at the flashing lights.

I felt worse as the glamour of Vegas proper melted into the long, wide roads I knew. Some part of me had tried to forget. That part was silent now, and old memories, old words, began to slip back into my mind. _I am a man raking through ashes, a man struggling to find the embers of life in the bottom of a fireplace._ We said nothing as Gyuri got out to go to a hardware store, staring out of separate windows.

I should have expected it, but pulling up to the boarded-up, silent house was, in some ways, worse than finding Sutton Place being casually torn apart. New York was constantly changing- nothing ever stayed for too long. Knowing that here, everything was a little more permanent- _my god, this fucking sand pit, who cares,_ as Boris had once said.

Boris hopped out the car happily enough, fetching the axe Gyuri had bought from the trunk. I got out slowly, standing awkwardly on the hot road while Gyuri hovered between getting out and staying in the car uncertainly. Of course, I thought, eyeing him. I liked him well enough, but having him about in the house… Boris wasn’t going to send him away. Not while we were unable to find anything to say to each other.

“See you in an hour?” he said to my surprise. Gyuri glanced at me before nodding silently, slipping back into the car and peeling away.

We walked around to a window on the side of the house. Boris pushed me back slightly before slamming the axe into the wood of the board. I jumped, startled, and he shot me a wild grin. “Like Raskolnikov, no?”

I gave a weak smile in return. Something in his expression softened, and he laid a hand on my shoulder, the head of the axe still wedged in the board.

“Is weird, isn’t it?”

It didn’t sound like a question. I bit down on my dry lips.

“Calling yourself Raskolnikov?”

“No-o-” He struggled with the axe, wood flying to the ground with a clatter. His dark eyes were steady on mind. “Being here. No change. Looks exactly the same. Except for…” he gestured to the wooden board. I nodded a little eagerly, leaning against the wall.

“It’s weird, right?” I said, and he nodded darkly, swinging the axe again. Glass shattered this time, and he jerked his head.

“Stand back, Potter.”

I did as I was told, handing him my glasses for a measure of protection. He put them on, and I snorted at the change in his appearance. He brought the axe down with a _hmmf!_

“Help me in,” he said after inspecting the window, making sure there were no jagged pieces of glass around the bare frame. “I’ll clear the glass and help you up.”

I boosted him up, hands around his thighs, face red from the effort. He disappeared into the house with a surprised sound, and I heard glass tinkling about before his grinning face appeared in the window. He stretched out his pale hands.

I jumped while he reached, and his hands pulled at my armpits before gripping tightly around my waist. He let out a surprised noise as we fell back onto the carpet together, ribs sore and breathing heavily, small bits of glass in our hair.

Boris started laughing. I couldn’t join in with his amusement, rolling onto my stomach and squinting without my glasses. The living room was bare- the kitchen too. The carpet and the ceiling were swept with an ugly pale grey cover- the ceiling from cigarettes, no doubt, and the carpet from dust. It gave everything a strange, old-film quality. It was like my mind was trying to make this the worst possible experience it could. _There’s where I was standing when dad slapped me. There’s where Boris threw up on the carpet and it had blood in it. There’s where_ -

“Potter,” Boris grumbled, rolling next to me and passing my glasses. I put them on silently.

He stood up first, holding out his hand. I struggled- he pulled- I was up. Boris sniffed the air sharply. I did the same. Old, stale cigarette smell, lingering in the walls and the carpet, barely clinging on in the dimly lit room. It was warmer than I expected, air warningly hot without the air conditioner.

He stepped through the glass and broken glass carefully. I followed, still holding onto his jacket tightly. If it bothered him, he didn’t say. He only turned when we reached the backdoor screen.

“Stay back,” he said, and I nodded wordlessly, stepping back.

It was easier to fit through the door than the window once he’d axed his way through it. The pool was drained, of course. In the light I could see the sweat at his temples.

“Fucking hot,” he said, taking off his jacket and shirt so he stood in a plain white vest, and he dropped into the empty swimming pool. I was warm, too, but didn’t have a vest beneath my shirt like he did. I hesitated. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before- but still. It had been a while.

Deciding it was better to be shirtless than fainting from the heat, I ditched my shirt and jumped down carefully. He’d walked to the centre of the pool, back turned from me as he lit a joint.

“Boris- how the fuck did you get that on the plane?”

He turned, shaking out the match. “Is legal here,” he said in his light ‘innocent’ voice. He took a drag, breathing out a stream of smoke towards me as his eyes briefly darted across me. I felt my cheeks heat slightly, and took the joint when he held it out. He, too, was something I’d seen before, and he was much the same. Same white skin, though marked with a few tattoos. An expensive belt around expensive suit pants. He’d used a shoe-string once to hold up baggy trousers made baggier by two days without food. Through the thin white cotton I could just see that he wasn’t as bony as he used to be- no more ribs that I could count. He was still thin, but with strings of muscle now. But it was different now- did he think so? I wondered if I was different from what he remembered. If he remembered. Who knew how many people he’d seen since then.

“Gyuri brought it for me,” he said as I handed it back. “He’s expert at that stuff.”

The weed was strong. I was half-tempted to ask him where we got it.

“Do you remember-?”

He turned, mouth twitching up in a smirk. “That laced weed?”

I snickered. We’d rolled around unhappily, convinced we were going to die, just out of it enough to not be able to call an ambulance. It had taken a whole day to pass.

The air felt heavier, pressing on my head. Boris was staring darkly at a corner of the pool, and I followed his gaze, wondering why. That was where he’d collapsed, I realised, drunk and high and stunned, bleeding. My mouth on his. Ugly chlorine smell, heavy in the air. I wondered whether his blood would still be there, dried in the stone. We could move to Siberia and shiver through winter and it would still be here, a piece of him, covered in desert sand no matter the time of year.

“Do you remember-”

“That night,” I said quickly. “Your dad-”

“ _Da._ ”

He started walking to the pool stairs, glancing back.

“Come on.”

We tossed our clothes into the living room, and he dropped the axe with them. We didn’t need to speak as we went upstairs. I sent a glance into my dad and Xandra’s room passing through bare doorways to my old room. The doors were taken off the built-in wardrobe, leaving it a ghostly presence in the nearly-pitch-black room. Boris snorted, and I knew why. My room had been so fucking bare anyways. This was just a heightened version. Sure, there had been ashtrays and empty plates and books strewn over the place, but aside from my bed, there’d been no real furniture. My bed was gone too, just faint imprints in the carpet.

We lay down where it used to be, passing the joint wordlessly. He was humming, tunelessly I thought, until he grabbed his phone from his pockets excitedly. The beginning of _Back in the U.S.S.R._ came floating out, sound tinny and small until he placed it between us. As it slipped into _Dear Prudence,_ I felt myself relax into the carpet, stubbing the joint on the wall. My eyes slipped closed. His breathing this close had seemed loud to me back then. It was louder with the air conditioning gone, slightly labored in the heat. I couldn’t blame him for that. Mine was, too. A whispering memory came up, clouds above, tinged in pain. _Time warp._ I felt as though I could close my eyes and be back on my bed, Boris still next to me, breathing heavily in sleep.

“Potter,” he whispered in the darkness, and my throat dried at the familiarity. He reached across, vest rubbing against the carpet, and put a hand on my chest above my heart. My heart thumped heavily against my ribs. Against his palm. Then he took it off me, lacing his fingers in mine and putting my hand over his heart. Only the thin cotton between the back of my hand. His fingers were still clammy, despite the heat.

“I won’t tell your wife if you sleep with some girl tonight at hotel,” he said quietly. Did he mean Kitsey? I didn’t bother correcting him. “If you want, though, my room is bigger. Could go without girls tonight. Would be like old times.”

I was glad his hand wasn’t above my heart anymore. “Yeah,” I whispered, and he didn’t reply.

We lay like that for what felt like hours or seconds, the White Album slipping away in the air. He released my hand and stood in a slow, stoned way.

I led us out, down the stairs, our footsteps louder on the stairs. All the times we had had to slip up quietly.

I put my shirt once we climbed back out the window, leaving it unbuttoned. Boris was humming again, swinging the axe as we walked to the sidewalk.

Gyuri wasn’t there yet. Only sand and the tall weeds were moving.

“Potter,” he said, turning to me. We looked at each other in silence for a few moments.

“Do you remember…” I trailed off. He didn’t react. I wanted to sink into myself. This, too, was a familiar pain. Asking him if he remembered.

In the stillness I could hear the car getting closer, but still, it hadn’t turned the corner. Boris opened his mouth as if to speak, and then took a swift step towards me, dropping the axe and his clothes to grip my face as he kissed my mouth, slower but with the same desperation and urgency I thought I’d felt in the last one.

He released me as Gyuri turned the corner, picking up the clothes and axe. I stood speechless, mouth still open.

He caught my eye as the car pulled up, giving a small nod. “Yes, Potter,” he said lowly. Seriously. I said nothing. “Haven’t forgot.”

I nodded too, dazed. He held the car door open for me, and I breathed out in relief at the feeling of cold air. I scrabbled over the seats, and he followed after me.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback/ thoughts v appreciated :)


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